Russia’s answer to the Loch Ness Monster, ‘Nesski’, seems to have one habit that it’s Scottish cousin doesn’t.

Eating fisherman.

Yes, the monster has now been blamed for 19 deaths in Chany lake over the past three years, a number, which, according to Russian experts, may actually be higher in their estimates.

Officially, each of these deaths has been listed on the books as a drowning, yet of all the people who have gone missing in or around Chany, only a few have ever been recovered, and those that have were reportedly half eaten. This, of course, has lead to speculation by the locals that Nesski has a hunger for human flesh.

The latest victim, a 59-year-0ld man who was pulled into the lake while fishing last week. According to the man’s close friend, 60-year-old Vladimir Golishev, the unlucky angler hooked ‘the big one’ and it lead to his demise.

‘I was with my friend… some 300 yards from the shore,’ Golishev explained. ”He hooked something huge on his bait, and he stood up in the boat to reel it in.

‘But it pulled with such force that he overturned the boat. I was in shock – I had never seen anything like it in my life.

‘I pulled off my clothes and swam for the shore, not daring hope I would make it.’

Golishev did make it back to shore without incident, but his long-time vanished without a trace.

Such was the case when Vladimir and Nina Doronin lost their 32-year-old grandson three years ago. Mikhail, a Russian soldier, fell into the lake after something large capsized his boat in calm water.

‘The lake was calm, but suddenly the boat was rocking, and it capsized,’ recalled the elderly grandmother.

Though the couple, who have lived on the shores of Chany their entire lives, firmly believe that Nesski is real, and probably caused the death of their grandson, they admit that they have never seen the monster.

Nesski, like Nessie, is believed to be a plesiosaur, an aquatic dinosaur with a long neck, small head, large body, relatively short tail and flippers, that, according to science, went extinct, like most dinosaurs, at the end of the Cretaceous Period.

Reports of Nesski in Lake Chany have been around for decades, though finding such a monster wouldn’t seem all that difficult. You see, the lake, though some 57 x 55 miles across, is only 23ft deep at it’s deepest point and much shallower in most areas. A fact that should make the monster easy to spot, and also makes one wonder why so many people would disappear in a body of water so shallow?

About Monster Island NewsFounder of the popular monster and sci-fi blogs Monster Island News and Godzilla 3D News and Information.
Ken Hulsey began his writing career in 2000 when he founded kensforce.com a popular site with fans of Japanese sci fi/monster movies (Godzilla, Gamera and the like) and other B movies.
In 2008, he closed down his original site and created the blog "Monster Island News" a showcase for classic horror/monster films and independent/alternative cinema.

This will surprise alot of people but I believe this is for real. Something like a lake or river monster would be an apex predator. No one see’s the crocodiles that eat them until its to late, and that happenns in very shallow water…

See, this is the thing that interests me about lake monsters: They’re often purported to be prehistoric reptiles like plesiosaurs or tylosaurs or icthyosaurs, etc. The problem with this theory is that many of these lake monsters are reported at northern latitudes where the water is obnoxiously cold. Unlike the dinosaurs that lived at the same time, there is no evidence that any of these animals, which by all accounts were fully reptile could thermoregulate.
I’m not discounting the theory out of hand that many lake monsters could indeed be prehistoric relics. There are a number of explanations for the survival of a cold-blooded reptile in cold-water. It could be that they, like other reptiles in colder regions, hibernate in the winter. Or it could be that in a manner similar to marine mammals, they’ve developed some type of insulating blubber. The only problem with that is, there’s no precedent to support that theory at all, and we can only tell so much from fossils. Fish also have ways of coping with very cold water and if fish can do it, why not reptiles?
I believe a lot of lake monsters are real, but I think they’re going to turn out to be a combination of different animals. There isn’t a one size fits all explanation for these things. Some are almost certainly fish while others could be aquatic mammals either known or unknown or undiscovered species of reptiles like large turtles, snakes or crocodilians. Less likely, there could be some out there that truly are reptilian relics from the mesozoic.
Whatever this is in Russia, it’s got to be pretty fierce to be taking fisherman out of the game like that.

In my opinion, several lake monsters are actually very likely to be surviving plesiosaurs. Skeptics of the plesiosaur hypothesis often claim that plesiosaurs could not possibly survive, in cold lakes, because they were cold-blooded reptiles. However, we’ve got to keep in mind that we don’t have a single shred of evidence that they were cold-blooded. First of all, perhaps they were warm-blooded, just like how we know that dinosaurs and pterosaurs probably were. Second of all, even if they were cold-blooded, they have three options: 1.) Hibernate, in the winter. 2.) Migrate, to a warmer area. (Not Likely). and 3.) Evolve a layer of insulating blubber, like modern cetaceans have.

Another supposed hurdle for my plesiosaur theory is that plesiosaurs’ neck anatomy prevented them from raising their head and neck up above the water, like what happens in many of the sightings of lake cryptids. Whenever a skeptic points that out to me, this is what I say to them: “An awful lot of evolution can happen, in 65 million years!”. In other words, plesiosaurs might have evolved a completely different neck structure, over the past 65 million years, since the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event.

Indeed, this is often one of the biggest mistakes I hear skeptics say. It seems to me like lots of people appear to believe that plesiosaurs in lakes today are exactly identical to their prehistoric ancestors. When, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. As I stated previously, an awful lot of evolution can happen, in 65 million years!

And, so, this is my case for why the hypothesis that lake monsters are plesiosaurs makes perfect sense.